“Movies such as ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’ rely preponderantly for their deeper effects upon sound,” wrote Michael J. Arlen, back in 1981. “The images catch the eye, of course, but the sound catches the emotions.”

This is particularly true for the specialized kind of organized sound known as music. Our emotions evolved to power our memories: the stronger the emotions arising from an experience, the more vivid and long-lasting our memories of it.

Music is the only time machine to which we mortals currently have access. A tune like “Tara’s Theme” from “Gone with the Wind,” or the “March of the Charioteers” from “Ben Hur,” can summon the entire movie — or, at least, the relevant scenes — to our conscious minds, bright and shiny as new-minted coins.

It is this link between music and memory that underpins the program of the Santa Barbara Symphony’s March concerts, which they call “An Oscar Celebration,” 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 16, and 3 p.m. Sunday, March 17, both marking a return to their home venue the Granada Theater.
 
The symphony announcement reads as follows: “Experience the glamour and nostalgia of Hollywood’s Golden Age of Oscar! Relive the memories of iconic movies and their indelible symphonic soundtracks. Classic scenes are presented via the Granada’s giant screen with The Symphony on stage playing live.”

The orchestra, under the baton of guest conductor Constantine Kitsopoulos, will perform Erich Wolfgang Korngold‘s score for “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), Max Steiner‘s “Gone with the Wind” (1939), Miklos Rozsa‘s “Ben Hur” (1959), Bernard Hermann‘s “Citizen Kane” (1941), George Gershwin‘s “An American in Paris” (1928, 1951), and Herbert Stothart‘s “The Wizard of Oz” (1939).

The host-narrator of the evening will be “best-selling author, actress and award-winning documentarian Leslie Zemeckis.” Accomplished in her own right, Zemeckis is further related to movies through her marriage to Robert Zemeckis, director of, among other films, “Romancing the Stone,” “Back to the Future I-III,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” and “Forrest Gump.”
 
Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) was a child prodigy, the son of the influential music critic, Julius Korngold. When Erich was 11, his ballet “The Snowman” took Vienna by storm, and, some in Viennese music circles, thinking of his extreme youth, suggested it was actually Julius who had written “The Snowman.”

“If I could write music that good,” said Korngold père, “Do you think I would have wasted my life writing criticism?”

Korngold’s crowning pre-Hollywood achievement, written when he was 23 (Orson Welles was 26 when he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in “Citizen Kane”), was his opera “The Dead City,” based on the dream-like Symbolist novel “Bruges-la-morte (1892)” by Belgian author Georges Rodenbach, notable for being the first work of fiction illustrated with photographs.

The opera is a gorgeous, unforgettable work, and fixed opera as Korngold’s ideal format. (He considered his film scores as “operas without singing.”)
 
The innovative German stage and film director Max Reinhardt, with whom Erich had collaborated throughout the 1920s, invited Korngold to Hollywood in 1934, to score his film of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Supposedly adapting Mendelssohn’s incidental music, Korngold actually composed almost the entire score, but he took credit only as an arranger.

While working on the Shakespeare film, he employed several techniques from his opera days, which would serve him for the rest of his career. One such was recording sections of the score and playing them for actors while they rehearsed, so they wound up speaking their lines in time to the music.

He became the first composer with an international reputation to work for the movie studios. After he retired from film scoring, he produced a terrific violin concerto, a fine symphony, and several beautiful string quartets, and they are all worth hearing.

Max Steiner (1888-1971), like Korngold, was a child prodigy. He conducted his first operetta when he was 12, and, by the time he was 15, he had become a full-time professional musician, composing, arranging, and conducting.

Working in England in 1914, Steiner faced internment as an enemy alien after the outbreak of World War I (1914-18), so he fled to the U.S. (which didn’t enter the war until 1917), first to New York and Broadway, then, in 1929, to Hollywood. He arrived on the soast at the very dawn of the Sound Era.
 
Korngold scored a total of 16 films; Steiner, more than 300. Nominated 24 times for Academy Awards, he received statuettes for three of his films. “Gone with the Wind” was not among them, although it is his best-known score, “Tara’s Theme” his best-known melody.

Steiner was also the first recipient of the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score — “Life with Father.”

Miklós Rózsa (1907-95) was born in Budapest, trained in Germany, worked in France and England until 1940 when production of the film “The Thief of Baghdad” was moved from wartime England to Hollywood, and he went with it to complete his score.

He remained in the United States from then on, becoming a citizen in 1946. He wrote almost 100 film scores, while maintaining a strong presence in the concert hall with his “absolute” music. He called it leading a “double life.”

Like Korngold, he wrote a violin concerto that was premiered by Jascha Heifetz.
 
“Ben Hur” was Rózsa’s third and final Academy Award, out of 17 nominations. His main problem in preparing the score was that no examples of Roman music have survived, and only five fragmentary pieces of Greek music are extent.

So, he studied all the Roman paintings and frescos for pictures of instruments and then consulted historians and instrument makers as to what those instruments were made of, how they worked, and what they might have sounded like. Then he set to work. He was equally at home with historical epics (“Ben Hur,” “Quo Vadis,” “El Cid”), contemporary dramas (“The Killers,” “Providence”), and even comedy (“Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”).

In 1938, Bernard Herrmann (1911-75) scored Orson Welles’s notorious radio drama “The War of the Worlds,” which convinced a significant portion of the audience that the Martians were landing in New Jersey.

Herman’s first movie score was “Citizen Kane.” Acknowledged by everyone as one of the greatest and most influential film composers, Herman won only one Academy Award, for “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1941), although, in 1976, he was given the  BAFTA (British Academy Film Awards) for “Taxi Driver.”

His scores were less melodic than atmospheric, and functioned more as production design than music. You didn’t wind up whistling his scores, but you felt how he wanted you to feel about what was going on onscreen.

George Gershwin (1898-1937) wrote his jazzy, impressionistic tone poem “An American in Paris” in 1928. It was not rearranged for the soundtrack of the Gene Kelly musical of the same name until 1959, 22 years after the composer’s death.

While Gershwin lived and worked in Hollywood during the 1930s, he was not primarily a writer of film scores but of songs, many written with his brother Ira as lyricist.

“Songwriter” was his day job, but he also had ambitions as a “serious” composer, and today, his works for the concert hall (“An American in Paris,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” and “Concerto in F”) and his opera (“Porgy and Bess”) make regular appearances in their venues, and are vividly present while many of his songs are as forgotten as the shows in which they appeared (many are still gems in a singer’s standard playlist, of course).
 
Herbert Stothart (1885-1949) was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, winning the “Best Original Score” for “The Wizard of Oz.” His score for “The Wizard” contains many familiar melodies of the songs from the movie—”We’re Off to See the Wizard,” “If I Only had a Brain,” “Over the Rainbow” — but those songs were written by Harold Arlen (1905-86), one of our greatest songwriters.
 
It is curious that two of the films whose scores the Santa Barbara Symphony will play, “Gone with the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz,” — two, indeed, of the most famous movies of all time — were directed by Victor Fleming (1889-1949).

Fleming never became a famous name like John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, or others, and never became the darling of the “auteur” theorists. That’s the studio system for you.
 
Tickets to “Oscar Night” are $35-$175, and can be purchased in-person at 1214 State St., by calling the Granada Theatre box office, 805-899-2222, or online at www.ticketing.granadasb.org/17847.